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Category: climatology – Page 91

What if we could go back in time to four decades ago, when we first heard the term “climate change,” and take a good look at planet Earth?

The new Google Earth Timelapse feature lets us do that. We can scan the globe and look back from the present day to 1984. The feature gives us a unique opportunity to see how human action and natural forces have changed the planet since the 1980s.

The Google Earth Timelapse feature will allow you to view a 37-year timelapse of the entire planet or zoom in on a specific location and time.

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You may not see them coming, but the effects of climate change are starting to be felt in certain parts of the world. An example of this is the destruction of several coral reefs around the globe in recent years. As devastating as that sounds, it is only the prologue to a long list of potentially catastrophic events yet to arrive. In the long term, climate change threatens to eventually drive humans towards extinction. Therefore, while little steps, like planting more trees and turning out lightbulbs when not in use, are certainly useful, bigger steps are needed to fend off the devastating effects of climate change.

An internal combustion engine is one of the prime contributors to climate change-causing carbon emissions. Such engines produce large quantities of nitrogen oxide, carbon monoxide and other hydrocarbons that harm the environment and cause respiratory disorders in individuals. Due to these—and many more—reasons, electric vehicles, or EVs, need to replace the ones with traditional combustion engines.

EV owners can save about US$700 a year on fuel costs alone. Also, the maintenance expenses of EVs are lower than those of standard vehicles. So, owning EVs can help them save money and reduce their extreme reliance on fossil fuel, thereby slowing down its inevitable depletion from the earth. Additionally, EVs are incredibly efficient as they only consume approximately 25–40 kWh per 100 miles. Most importantly, EVs reduce CO2 emissions by nearly 178 million kg. What’s more, despite the high fuel efficiency and smaller carbon footprint, EVs can outperform vehicles with traditional combustion engines easily.

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During a summer storm in 2018, a momentous lightning bolt flashed above a network of radio telescopes in the Netherlands. The telescopes’ detailed recordings, which were processed only recently, reveal something no one has seen before: lightning actually starting up inside a thundercloud.

In a new paper that will soon be published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, researchers used the observations to settle a long-standing debate about what triggers lightning — the first step in the mysterious process by which bolts arise, grow and propagate to the ground. “It’s kind of embarrassing. It’s the most energetic process on the planet, we have religions centered around this thing, and we have no idea how it works,” said Brian Hare, a lightning researcher at the University of Groningen and a co-author of the new paper.

The schoolbook picture is that, inside a thundercloud, hail falls as lighter ice crystals rise. The hail rubs off the ice crystals’ negatively charged electrons, leading the top of the cloud to become positively charged while the bottom becomes negatively charged. This creates an electric field that grows until a gigantic spark jumps across the sky.

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And it can allegedly survive a ‘once-in-10,000-years weather event’.

A safe reactor is a seaworthy reactor.

Or at least, it should be.

China claims its floating nuclear reactors, which will power off-shore oil rigs, can withstand “once-in-10,000-year” storms, according to an initial report from The South China Morning Post. That means hurricane-force winds, and more. To test its resilience, marine engineers subjected a model of the newly designed 60-megawatt reactors to strong winds and dangerously powerful undercurrents.

While strong storms are uncommon in the Bohai Sea, where the reactors will be used, the consequences of an accident would be so great that failure simply isn’t an option. “The ship body must not capsize under any circumstance,” said the researchers, according to the report.

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Moderator: Michael Wall.
Panelists: Kennda Lynch, Abigail Fraeman, Morgan Cable.

Part of the Earth at the Crossroads conference held on Nov. 18, 2021.

Tantalizing new discoveries suggest that we are probably not alone in the universe. And yet, as Enrico Fermi first put in 1950: where is everybody? Are habitable worlds rare, unlikely, and therefore cosmically precious? Or is life easily overwhelmed by changing planetary conditions? Do technological societies in particular face an inevitable “Great Filter” that causes their extinction? These questions link the search for extraterrestrial life to the urgent environmental challenges facing our own civilization, from deadly pandemics to human-caused climate change. On November 18th, Georgetown University and the SETI Institute will unite scholars, journalists, artists and activists in conversations that explore what the search for alien life may reveal about the future of life on Earth. These conversations will be open to Georgetown students and will be broadcast to the public. They will culminate in a roundtable debate intended to draft a proclamation on the state of Earth’s environment and its future potential in a cosmic context.

If you like science, support the SETI Institute! We’re a non-profit research institution whose focus is understanding the nature and origins of life in the universe. Donate here: https://seti.org/donate.

Learn more about the SETI Institute and stay up-to-date on awesome science:

- Subscribe to our YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/c/SETIInstitute/

Continue reading “Habitability in the Solar System” | >

For the first time ever, a manmade object has entered the Sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona, which inexplicably is thousands of times hotter than our star’s surface (or photosphere).

Researchers led by a team at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor were able to predict where the Sun’s upper atmosphere began, and the probe was able to penetrate it for roughly five hours. The Parker probe was not only able to fly through the Sun’s atmosphere but was also able to sample particles and magnetic fields there, says NASA.

“Flying so close to the Sun, Parker Solar Probe now senses conditions in the magnetically dominated layer of the solar atmosphere — the corona — that we never could before,” Nour Raouafi, the Parker project scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, said in a statement. “We can actually see the spacecraft flying through coronal structures that can be observed during a total solar eclipse.”

On April 28, 2021, during its eighth flyby of the Sun, Parker Solar Probe encountered the specific magnetic and particle conditions some 8.1 million miles above the solar surface, NASA reports. That point, known as the Alfvén critical surface, marks the end of the solar atmosphere and beginning of the solar wind, says NASA.

The surface of the Sun is about 6,000 Celsius, Justin Kasper, the first author of a paper detailing the research in the journal Physical Review Letters, and a professor of climate and space sciences at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, told me. Above that, the temperature rises to more than a million degrees, he says.

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They could be “critical in the fight against climate change.”

A California-based startup called H2 Clipper wants to resurrect the hydrogen-filled airship as a form of mass transport. The key difference is that it won’t be transporting people, it will be transporting cargo, a press statement reveals.

The company aims to kickstart a green global cargo network by leveraging the world’s renewed willingness to try alternative forms of transport following the IPCC’s dire climate change report for 2021.

H2 Clipper claims its cargo airships can carry 8–10 times the payload of the best cargo plane over 6,000 miles (9,656 km), and it can do so at a quarter of the price. They will have a payload capacity of approximately 340,000 lb (150,000 kg) sitting in up to 265,000 cubic feet (7,530 cubic meters) of cargo space.

As for speed, the H2 Clipper would travel at a cruising speed of 175 mph (282 km/h), meaning it would move close to ten times faster than a cargo ship — though it would obviously lag behind a cargo plane in that department. The main advantage over today’s cargo planes is that the H2 Clipper produces zero carbon emissions.

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